Gross War [paul Gross] - Dylan Young - Sharp - Sept2008

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BOSS Black jacket ($895) and wool pants ($450). 50 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM

Paul Gross is sitting in a low-backed director’s chair, the makeup girl hovering around him like a fairy sprite of even-toned skin and carefully tousled hair. He sips coffee from a paper cup, revealing none of the stress you’d expect under the circumstances. For weeks now, he’s been working against the clock to finish the mix for his second feature-length film, the First World War drama Passchendaele. It’s a big film. In fact, it’s the biggest film ever made exclusively with Canadian funding, a 20 million dollar domestic blockbuster that Gross wrote, produced, directed and stars in. And there’s a sense—ever so slight—that what happens with this film could completely alter the paradigm of how films are made in this country. But, right now, he’s not thinking about the accolades or hype. He’s just sipping his coffee, talking to me and waiting patiently for the moment when he can get back to the production process he has characterized as “exhausting.” If he’s exhausted, he’s hiding it well. He looks and acts every bit the national icon that he is. He balks at the characterization. Being a poster boy for anything, much less certain notions of Canadian manhood and artistic intelligence, is just not something he is willing to own. “I’ve never been massively ambitious,” he says. “I’ve never had any strategic sense about what I was doing career-wise. If anything, I have intellectual ADD. I just grab onto things that interest me and do them. The rest is just collateral.” Nobody could deny—not even Gross—that his career, collateral or otherwise, has been blessed, relatively speaking anyway. Success means something very different for an actor, writer, director, producer who has worked almost exclusively in Canada. Because—let’s face it—when we’re talking about Canadian film and television, we’re talking about success on a completely different scale than we’d find south of the border. Gross knows this but he’s comfortable with the choices he’s made. “I did the L.A. thing,” he says. “It was a long time ago. I did a feature for Disney, a skiing movie, ‘Top Gun on the slopes!’ It was forgettable.” “I was also up for a role in the Flintstones movie,” he

adds. “I thought, ‘Can I do this? Do I really want to wind up being a live action cartoon?’ I suppose if I had done it, I might have a very different career. We’d be doing this interview in the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont.” Ironically, the role that brought him back to Canada— the one that probably did more for his career than any other—was one he’d been offered before moving to Los Angeles. “I’d read it before but I really didn’t want to do television then,” he admits. “Sitting in my Hollywood apartment looking at a stack of dumb Hollywood treatments, I felt creatively brittle. I just picked up this old script and started reading it. Soon, I was laughing out loud.” In that instant, he decided he would move back to Canada and take on the role of RCMP Constable Benton Fraser in the soon-to-be cultishly popular series Due South. For those who somehow missed the storm of that show’s pre-millennial success, suffice to say it utterly redefined the model for Canadian television. Created for CBS and CTV by Paul Haggis (of Crash, Million Dollar Baby and the soon-to-be-released Bond flick Quantum of Solace), Due South became the first Canadian-made series to secure a prime-time slot on a US network and to air simultaneously in both countries. Although CBS never seemed completely comfortable with the show, they aired it from 1994 to 1996. By then, Due South had found purchasers in the international market. CTV ran it for three more years, by which time it had aired on stations worldwide, from Britain’s BBC Two to Iran’s Channel 3. By 1999, Gross was well into his collateral ascent, having become the show’s executive producer, the highest paid performer in Canadian entertainment history, a four-time Gemini award-winner (both for acting and for his writing on the episode “Mountie on the Bounty”), and Canada’s most recognizable export since the goalie mask. Post Due South, Gross didn’t use his newfound stature to shoehorn his way into the Hollywood star-maker machinery. In fact, he did the polar opposite—he became an independent filmmaker. “A couple of times in my career, I made decisions based on money or that I thought would advance my career,” he confesses. “I was miserable. I vowed if I could SHARPFORMEN.COM Sharp September 2008 51

avoid it, I would never do that again. I suppose I’ve just pursued those things that I found to be artistically compelling.” His directorial debut, Men with Brooms, set the tone. He describes the film as “just a little comedy about curling.” It is a little comedy about curling, but it was also the highest-grossing box office for an EnglishCanadian film in twenty years. And it’s the film that put his production company Whizbang Films on the map. Whizbang has gone on to helm several stellar productions, among them H2O and The Trojan Horse—two ferociously astute Canadian-based political thrillers, which aired on CBC—and most recently Passchendaele. Gross is particularly concerned with the defining character of the First World War. “It was the world’s first total war: it turned everything on its head; it started five empires; it nearly obliterated the monarchies; science, medicine and technology were utterly transformed; and religious orthodoxy was punted so far down the field it’s only just started to resurface.” “And I think it was of particular importance for Canadians,” he says. “What it means to be Canadian was to a large extent defined in that war. When it began, we were still in the shadow of England. But after Vimy, we were an independent army. We had the Canadian Corps and our own generals. We were good warriors and we were good at war. We’re not so comfortable with that idea now but it helped give us our sense as a people.” Suddenly, the makeup artist is on us again, this time brandishing a complicated metal instrument. “We’re almost ready to start the photo shoot. Would you mind if I use this to curl back your eyelashes?” she asks. “It will open up your eyes for the camera.” “Whatever you like,” he says. “Anything you can do to make me look more beautiful for the camera.” The stylists usher him into wardrobe and shuffle him through a variety outfits. In front of the camera he is patient and funny, debonair even. But he’s not a camera whore. It’s part of the job and he suffers it

¸>OLUB[OL^HYDILNHU^L^LYLZ[PSSPU[OLZOHKV^VM ,UNSHUK)\[HM[LY=PT`^L^LYLHUPUKLWLUKLU[HYT`¹ without complaint. Finally, Gross is stuffed into his last outfit, a stiff wool-grey affair that looks like the kind of thing Erich von Stroheim would have worn in Grand Illusion. It’s fair to say he does not look comfortable. “I feel like an Austrian cavalier,” he quips. The stylists shoo him in front of the lens, all the while cajoling him that he looks great. For the first time, he looks nonplussed. “So you just want me to stand here and pretend like this is something I’d actually wear?”

This page: BOSS Black velvet jacket ($995). Shirt ($350) by Gucci with Etro sweater ($495) and pants ($350). Facing page: Hugo Boss tuxedo jacket ($1,298) and bow tie ($125). Shirt by Eton ($250), Seven jeans ($230), belt by Allen Edmonds ($125). All from Harry Rosen.

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Gross and I are stepping out into the street, on our way to Technicolor, where he has invited me to sit in on the mix. His car is parked just outside the building, in a spot clearly designated “No parking.” He grabs the yellow slip off the windshield and hops in. Pulling away from the curb, he jams the ticket into a wad of identical yellow slips he has balled-up in a slot under the radio. It’s evident just how little he is willing to sweat the small stuff right now. Born in 1959, the eldest son of art historian Renie Gross and tank commander Bob Gross, he spent his early years flitting around the globe from army base to army base. In his seminal political thriller H2O, Gross plants this admission on his protagonist, Tom McLaughlin. “As a teenager, I was a bit of a handful.” Gross won’t deny that he had parallel leanings. But acting gave him an outlet for his exuberance, and before long he was set on a course towards a life in theatre. In the middle of his third year at the University of Alberta’s drama program, he dropped out to pursue a professional career. That was 1980. The same year he wrote his first play, scribbling dialogue on napkins dur-

ing slow shifts at his waiting job. The Deer and the Antelope Play garnered him two awards. Six years later, he was comfortably ensconced at the prestigious Stratford Festival, playwright-in-residence under artistic director John Neville. All the while he was acting, stalking the planks anywhere he could get a decent role. He met his wife of 20 years, actress Martha Burns, while performing in Walsh at The National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Burns played an Indian princess and Gross played—in a strange twist of foreshadowing—a Mountie. “You know,” he offers, “there was a time when doing anything but theatre would have seemed absurd to me.” Gross tapped into that intimacy with the theatre when he took the role of Jeffrey Tennant in the critically acclaimed series Slings & Arrows. Playing the psychologically unstable, uniquely gifted Artistic Director of the fictional New Burbage Theatre Festival, he was able to dramatically and satirically explore the many virtues and failings of theatrical life. As we weave through the clutch of Toronto’s midday traffic, I ask him if he found the transition from stage to screen an easy one. “No. I really didn’t,” he confesses. “In theatre, there’s a lift that you need to put in to project a performance outside of yourself. With the screen stuff the energy is in reverse. For a performance to work you have to pull the camera into you.” “There’s an old adage that the camera never lies. I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “I think cameras lie and I think you can lie to them. But I do think that a camera will always sense labour. If you’re sweating it, that’s when you have to back off. Trying to find that level of performative honesty, that connection to whatever it is that you’re photographing, SHARPFORMEN.COM Sharp September 2008 53

As we eat, he tells me more about Passchendaele, the project that’s been percolating in his imagination for well over a decade. His version of the story, the one he has memorialized in film, was cobbled together from wartime diaries, regimental records, his own fabulations and accounts from his grandfather. “The opening scene is a story my grandfather told me,” he explains. “The rest I built up around something I found in the regimental history, a story about a company that was sent to relieve a battalion.” “The company was about 69 men and the battalion was around 600. The battalion thought that they were being relieved by another battalion. So, they left, leaving these 69 men to hold the front.” “And, yes, there’s friendship and romance,” he adds. “There had to be. The only way to counterbalance the inexplicable and endless brutality of war is with individual acts of love and self-sacrifice. There’s nothing false in that.” As he nears the finish line of this latest greatest triumph, Gross has become increasingly circumspect. “You know, I said earlier that I wasn’t ambitious. That’s not entirely true. I’m very ambitious for Passchendaele. It wasn’t easy getting here and there’s still a long way to go.” When I ask him what he means by that, he answers without hesitation. “A lot has been made about how big the budget for this film was. And in real dollars, it is a lot of money. But relative to what we were trying to do, it was actually a pretty low-budget film.” Lack of funding is only half of what he’s talking about. Governmental ambivalence is a constant threat to original stories—not just in the monetary sense but in the of kind ponderous institutional thinking that prefers to put its weight behind a Sound of Music reality show, rather than original dramas like Da Vinci’s City Hall or Gross’ own Trojan Horse. “I can’t say I’ve ever really understood the governmental attitude,” he says “There’s very little interest there in developing the cultural sector. And it’s a huge mistake because the culture sector is a huge money

¸>OH[^HZP[.YV\JOV4HY_ZHPK&5PUL[`WLYJLU[VM HJ[PUNPZZPUJLYP[`0M`V\JHUMHRL[OH[`V\»]LNV[P[THKL¹ that’s the hard part.” “I’ve had to develop an easier relationship with the camera because I spend more time around it,” he adds. “And when you’re acting in something that you’re also directing…I just don’t have the amount of time to sit around fretting about what I’m doing as an actor. The less I think about it the better I am.” “What was it Groucho Marx said? ‘Ninety percent of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.’” For the uninitiated, a mixing studio would best be described as a combination Cineplex theatre and a NASA control centre. A large screen dominates the front of the room. On it, a two-minute battle sequence is being played forwards, then backwards, then forwards again in a ceaseless seesawing of explosive debris and mind-numbing sound. Minutes after his return, Gross has slipped effortlessly into full-bore post-production mode. There’s a debate among the gathered sound professionals about how many frames should pass between the last timpani strike and the first artillery blast. He gives it a quick listen and has them nudge it. Once again the room fills with the din of nail-biting drama. When the sequence ends he says, “Yeah, that works.” He spends the next several minutes debriefing his team on the progress made during his absence. After addressing a few more issues, he asks, “do you guys have enough to keep busy for a while if I skip out for a bite?” Then he turns to me and, raising his eyebrows, says “Are you hungry? It’s fish and chips today.” 54 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM

producer for them.” “Back when Paul Martin was Minister of Finance we met to discuss the issue. At one point he just stopped me. ‘You don’t need to convince me,’ he said. ‘When we put money into what you guys do, it gives the biggest bang for the government buck. We dump millions to create a few solid jobs in mining but we get a lot more high-yield jobs every time we stimulate your industry.’” The question is—it being such a complex muddle—what we can do? “I don’t honestly know,” admits Gross. “Quebec has done a good job. There’s a perfect example of where the government will to invest in a national narrative has resulted in a cultural boom. They completely revitalized their cultural sector and that’s reflected in the public discourse.” In the meantime, Gross is resigned to being creative in his funding strategies, pursuing a campaign he calls My Dinners with Billionaires. “It would actually make a good documentary,” he jokes. “I could just bring a little camera along.” As he heads back to the studio, ready to cobble together more sonic sturm onto his baby-blockbuster, he leaves me with one last thought. “A very funny question someone at Telefilm asked was ‘why do we need a war film?’” he says, shaking his head. “That to me was the perfect technocratically baffling question. Why would you ever ask that? As if the first expression of Western culture, The Iliad, isn’t twenty-four long chapters of the grizzliest hand-to-hand combat. We have done this— war—pretty much in an unbroken stream for time immemorial. It’s where we began. And how the hell are we going to figure out where we’re going, if we don’t know where we came from?” SHARPFORMEN.COM Sharp September 2008 55